In Blackadder goes Forth, General Melchett tells Private Baldrick not to worry “my boy”, as another offensive on the Western Front is being planned.
“If you should falter, remember that Captain Darling and I are behind you”, says the moustachioed general, to which Captain Blackadder responds, “about 35 miles behind you”.
There was something of Melchett and Darling in Sir Keir Starmer and, his Damsel, Angela Rayner’s joint decision to abstain from the vote to block the setup of a national enquiry on rape gangs last week.
Both led their troops - figuratively 35 miles behind them – over the political top only to watch their reputation forever obliterated.
On the orders of their cowardly generals, the 364 MPs, mostly Labour, blocked the move to shed some light on Oldham and “Muslim Rape Gangs” as described by Lord Pearson in Parliament - a local aspect of the longest running nationwide scandal in our long Island history.
The authorities who enabled the grooming gangs should face a Nuremberg-style trial - Alex StoryGetty Images
The vote will ensure that their names live forever in infamy. Many Labour MPs are now dealing with the flotsam of their soiledconsciousness and visibly putrefying political careers, telling an incredulous public that they only voted “against a Tory attempt to block the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill”.
Luke Charters, among others, is now saying that “if the victims want to come forward”, they can do so.
The cruel joke, from such an uncharismatic automaton, of course, is that thousands of prepubescent victims have come forward over decades only to be ignored by those in authorities, a fact on which the multiplying gang rapists have wagered their easily-earned dole money.
However, beyond these contemptible attempts to rescue doomed political careers, Starmer’s decision to hide behind Alexis Jay’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse is noteworthy.
Indeed, her work has nothing to do with “Asian grooming gangs” in Oldham or anywhere else and all to do with institutional processes that pertain to child abuse.
In certain cases, in her report, she is “brave”, in others much less so.
Her bravery shines through when writing about Christian institutional failings. So much so, in fact, that she dares brush with Christian theology.
“The Anglican Church is marked by its explicit moral purpose in teaching right from wrong”, she writes, adding despondently (and quite rightly) that “protecting its reputation was in conflict with its mission of love and care for the innocent and vulnerable.”
The report, though, meanders from the institutional responses to allegations involving the late Lord Janner to the abuse of children in custodial organisations, as well as from international paedophile networks to forms of compensations for abused children.
Less brave, given the Zeitgeist, was the very timid hint of a potential broader issue, which, carefully, kept things culturally neutral.
“Those who were sexually abused in a religious organisation sometimes said that they lost their personal faith”, Professor Jay wrote. She continued: “Aalia stopped going to the mosque and lost her Islamic faith after she was sexually abused”. In the footnotes we read that, when she was seven, a year older than Aisha was when she married Islam’s prophet, who was 53 at the time, “the mosque representative started touching Aalia” and “masturbating in front of her”.
Where are the gallows when needed?
All in all, her work is worth reading, if only to understand the dangers children face.
But the Jay report and the demand for a national inquiry on Pakistani grooming gangs are totally unrelated.
It would be a terrible shame if Professor Jay allowed herself to be used by Starmer as a shield for his cravenness.
After all, she has done some invaluable work in this sorry field.
She led the “Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham”, published in August 2014, in the aftermath of The Times’ expose on the topic “Revealed: conspiracy of silence on UK sex gangs” by prize winning investigative journalist Andrew Norfolk, which found that, at a very conservative estimate, over 1400 preadolescent girls had been sexually abused by Pakistani gangs.
In it, she wrote that by far “the majority of perpetrators were described as 'Asian' by victims” and that a major issue was the “reliance by agencies on traditional community leaders” such as “imams as being the primary conduit of communication with the Pakistani-heritage community”.
Tragically, this meant that neither Christian, Hindu nor indeed Muslim girls lived under the laws of Westminster.
Repeatedly, Jay writes that justice was denied “by the fear of affecting community relations”.
LATEST MEMBERSHIP DEVELOPMENTS
In the report, the UK Muslim Women’s network showed that Pakistani “girls were being sexually exploited where authorities were failing to identify or support them”, being most “vulnerable to men from their own communities”.
Further, young Muslim girls were subjected to the most appalling abuse in the full knowledge that the authorities, out of deference to the Gods of Multiculturalism, would only speak to their sadistic and patriarchal tormentors.
Muslim girls, as other children for other religions, suffered “oral, anal and vaginal rape… insertion of objects into the vagina; severe beatings; burning with cigarettes…”
Muslim Women, the most inaudible victims to our leaders, wanted to highlight that not only Christian “girls are victims of sexual exploitation” by Muslim males.
Perhaps, in all of this, one should consider that there might be an important theological and religious justification behind such barbaric misogyny.
An earlier report, this time by Dr Heal in 2003, stated that one of the difficulties that prevent this issue being dealt with effectively is “the ethnicity of the main perpetrators”. The fear of allegations of racism hung like a corroding sword of Damocles over the heads of those in power then, just as it does now.
As an example, Sarah Champion Labour’s MP for Rotherham argued in 2015 that there “could be up to a million victims of child sexual exploitation”.
She persevered and courageously confronted the issue head-on in a Sun opinion piece in August 2017. “Pakistani men ARE raping and exploiting white girls… and it’s time we faced up to it,” she wrote.
But in bathetic lessons were learnt moment, she was instantly put under pressure to resign her shadow front-bench position by the Labour leadership, which she did, apologising for highlighting the issue and causing offence, thereby letting down the young girls to whom she had given hope.
Continuing the policy of appeasement, and retreat in the face of savagery, Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, recently claimed that the “rhetoric” concerning rape gangs to describe Britain’s worst ever scandal could damage community relations.
Of interest is that Wes was also chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims, the findings of which found that “there is no ‘good faith’ criticism of Islam” and that any such should be deemed racist and subject to criminal law.
The irony is that we all know what has been and is still happening. We stand bewildered in the face of the full, perhaps irreversible, visible and quickening moral collapse of our nation.
No matter what the costs, hide the problem you created, attack those who notice, until it metastasises – that is the cardinal rule by which our leaders live.
Further, Professor Jay noted in her 2014 report that “South Yorkshire Police received 157 reports concerning child sexual exploitation in Rotherham”. That year, the Crown Prosecution Service, led by Keir Starmer, handed out two cautions but took “no further action”.
Worthy of an inquiry? Perhaps.
It would be interesting to look at the Crown Protection Service’s leadership from 2008 to 2013; at the philosophy that allowed vague notions of “community relations” to overturn our ancient and deeply seated concepts of justice over the last three to four decades; and finally, to study the religious justifications, if any, behind such appallingly barbarous, to our eyes and ears at least, behaviour.
What we really need, however, is a Nuremberg-style trial in which all those in authority, who have allowed this to happen, pay for the crimes they have enabled.
Those in authority must face good old-fashioned justice because, so far, no one has.
